Abstract:

The Corona Pandemic confronted German universities and schools to offer their courses in an entirely digital form within a very short time [Höfer-Lück, Delere, Vogel 2020]. The research project presented in the article surveys the perspectives of lecturers in teacher training at two universities (Technical University Dortmund; University of Education Ludwigsburg) in the run-up to the “emergency remote teaching” [Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, Bond 2020] semester based on a semi-standardized questionnaire [Mertens 2015]. The project aimed to carry out open-ended accompanying research on the perception of potentials and risks of converting to digital teaching offers in teacher training. In total, we received 145 responses to our questionnaire at the beginning of the semester. Among other things, we asked for the media use behavior, the importance attributed to the use of digital media in teaching, its didactic potential, and the possible effects of the changed teaching-learning conditions on lecturers and students, using Likert scales. Subsequently, the participants were able to present their expectations and fears within open questions. The answers were highly diverse and showed that digital teaching is not seen as a substantial own didactic instrument. The digital is always directly related to the analog, opening up the opposition of the ‘real’ and the ‘not-real’ or respectively ‘virtual’ ([Roesler, Stiegler 2005], [Chalmers 2017]). The ‘not-real’ here is what needs to be taken into account.

The intended paper attempts to derive these perceptions’ underlying reasons, especially the lecturers’ expectations and fears. We argue for this on the level of distance education theories [Anderson, Dron 2011], and especially on the level of spatial theory. The main question is how far the lecturers perceive a collaborative teaching and learning space with their students in the online semester’s digital structures [Harrison 2018]. If teaching is regarded as a process necessarily based on social relations, the main question arising for us is which possibilities of creating the social spaces are required [Schroer 2003]. These result from social goods or people's simultaneous placement, called spacing, and the synthesis of the placed goods as a shared space ([Löw, Sturm 2005], [Christmann 2016]). We regard the process of synthesis as central to digital structures. Here, material goods and bodies are placed in various ways but must also be perceived as belonging together to create digital spaces. Therefore, we want to investigate which characteristics the lecturers ascribe to the online semester’s digital structures to research if they synthesize different kinds of digital teaching space.

Keywords:

Corona Pandemic, Remote Teaching, Digital Space.